Recovering A Hijacked GMB Profile

Transcript

Hello everyone! I’m Jason Crabtree from Agent Branding System, and thanks for joining us on The Marketing Moment. Today’s topic is How to Recover Your Google My Business profile if it’s been hijacked by somebody else. When I say hijacked, I mean that you are no longer in possession of your login, your password, and you’re not able to go in and modify or make changes to your Google My Business profile. This happens quite frequently. It’s not always a nefarious act. It could just mean that a former employee set it up for you, and you don’t have that email address that they use to set it up. It could mean that another advertising agency or marketing agency that you used to use set this up for you, and you just don’t have the access to go in now and make profile changes. Let’s get started. Here’s how this works: The first thing we want to do is get to your Google My Business page and see if we can log in. There are a few ways you can get there. Open up a new web browser, and you can either type google.com/business into the search bar, or you can type in businessgoogle.com. If you’re on Google already, you can just do a search for Google My Business. You do that search and it will take you to a search results page that looks like this. That will have options where you can click on a link, like this one, that will take you to the Google My Business start page. Once you’re there, the page will look like this. You want to click on the little green button that says “start now.” It’ll ask you to sign in and in this case, Google already knew a few of my email addresses that I might have used to work on business profiles in the past. So, I clicked on one of those. If they don’t know yours, you can just type it in. So go ahead and sign in to Google and then once you’re signed in it’ll take you to a page that looks like this, where it’s going to ask you to look for the business that you want to manage. I started typing in “Agent Branding System,” and you can see here that they already knew who Agent Branding System is and had that business information. If I just click on the name it’ll auto populate this, and I can just hit “continue.” Once I hit continue, remember I’m signed in as me and it says someone else has already verified this Google listing. You can see they won’t show you the entire email address but they’ll try to prompt you in case you own that email address. If you see this email address like this and that is yours, then you aren’t hijacked, and you just need to log out of whichever email address you used to log in a minute ago. Then, log back in under this one. You should then be able to manage your Google My Business profile. If that’s not your email address, then you need to request ownership. We’ll take the few next steps – so click on “request ownership.” You’re going to be taken to a page that looks like this, where they’re going to want a little bit more information about you, the person. Who is now requesting ownership of this verified Google listing? It’ll ask you if it’s okay to show that person your contact info. So, you want to say “yes” on that one. You also want to let them know that you’re requesting ownership, and you want to let them know that you are the business owner. You put your name on there so they know who they’re working with, in case it’s a former employee or an old marketing agency, they can see that you are requesting ownership from them. You can also add your phone number in case they want to give you a call to talk it over and see what steps need to take place in order for them to give you access and ownership. You should always own your Google My Business profile. So that once you complete that, you can hit OK. That will send the ownership request, and they’re going to get a little note that looks like this: “Someone has requested ownership of your business name.” It’ll show the contact info, the title as owner, email address, and the phone number. Then, it can at that time, either grant you ownership or they can reject your request. The third option would be that they just don’t respond at all. If any of those last two things happen, always give them about seven days to w week to digest the request and respond. If they reject it, or if they don’t respond at all, we have other options. We can appeal when you get a response that says they rejected your request. Then you want to hit “appeal.” So we’ll go to this section here, and we’ll click on the “appeal” button, and then you authorize that you are the business owner, that you’re authorized to manage the business, and agree to their terms of service. Then hit “continue.” They’re going to want to do a manual verification in that case. They want to see that you are that business at that location, so they’re going to send out a postcard. It’s three easy steps, very simple. They’re going to send a postcard, and the postcard will have a code on it. Once you get that code, you go back to the website and type in the code. Click “submit,” and you are now the business owner. If none of those things work you can still always call Google My Business for assistance, and here’s the phone number. Give them a call, and they will walk you through and manually help you take back ownership of your business. It’s as simple as that! I hope this information was useful and informative, and thanks, as always, for joining us on The Marketing Moment. I’m Jason Crabtree from Agent Branding System and I appreciate your time.